Dr Alan Renwick

Alan Renwick joined UCL in September 2015. His expertise lies mainly in the areas of electoral systems, referendums, and other modes of engaging the public in decision-making processes, such as citizens’ assemblies. His research is comparative: besides the UK, his recent projects have included all European democracies as well as New Zealand, Japan, and Canada.

Alan works with policy-makers on a range of issues. He became a source of authoritative, impartial evidence during the UK’s electoral system referendum of 2011. He has provided evidence to parliamentary select committees on a range of topics, including electoral reform, reform of the House of Lords, and provision allowing the recall of MPs. He is currently engaged with those interested in understanding how to
improve the quality of information available during election and referendum
campaigns and how to bring a more deliberative approach to politics. Outside the UK, he has also provided advice and participated in debates in a range of settings, including Egypt, Jordan, Hong Kong, and Jersey.

Before coming to UCL, Alan was based at the Universities of Oxford and Reading. He obtained his doctorate, on processes of institutional design in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland during transition from communism, in 2004. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at New College, Oxford from 2003 until 2008 and a Departmental Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford, from 2005 to 2006. He was based at the University of Reading, latterly as Reader and Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, between 2008 and 2015.

Alan Renwick is one of the world’s leading experts on processes of electoral reform: he has written two major academic books on the subject and a third book aimed for a general audience. He has also contributed to public debates in the UK and elsewhere. His most recent research focuses in particular on the ‘personalization’ of European electoral systems. He is currently working on the performance of the UK electoral system and debates about electoral reform.

Alan also conducts research on referendums. He is looking in particular at the quality of the debates that take place during referendum campaigns and at how opinion changes over the course of these campaigns. Both of these research strands are intended to feed into better understanding of the contributions – positive and negative – that referendums might make to democratic systems.

Alan is also increasingly interested in mechanisms besides elections and referendums through which members of the public may be enabled to participate in decision-making processes. In particular, he is working on the role that can be played by citizens’ assemblies and other organs comprising ordinary citizens who are selected by lot. This is outlined below in relation to his work on constitutional conventions.

Alan leads the Constitution Unit’s work on Brexit and the UK’s evolving
relationship with the European Union. He
published a report in early 2017 setting out how the politics of Brexit is
likely to unfold within the UK. He is
leading a project to run a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit September 2017, which will give unique
insight into what kind of Brexit members of the public prefer when they have
had the chance to learn and think in depth about the options. This
project is part of the ESRC-funded UK in a
Changing Europe initiative.

Alan has been a leading voice in the recent upsurge of interest in the UK in the idea of establishing a constitutional convention to consider issues of constitutional and democratic reform. He has explored different forms that such a convention might take and is now focusing particularly on the citizens’ assembly model, where deliberation takes place in an assembly that is wholly or partly comprised of randomly selected citizens. The Citizens’
Assembly on Brexit is the latest phase of this work.

He is also working on the evolution of democracy in the UK since 1945, looking at the changing roles of citizens and other actors in British politics, at changes in expectations about those roles, and at the evolution of discourse around various political reforms.

The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit has just begun its work. The project’s director, Alan Renwick, here offers some initial, personal reflections on a highly successful first weekend. The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit has just completed its first weekend of deliberations. As an earlier post explained, the Assembly is a gathering of people from across the […]

The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit – a group of citizens that will consider options for Brexit – meets for the first time today. In this post Alan Renwick, Rebecca McKee, Will Jennings and Aleksei Opacic explain the process by which members were selected to be representative of the UK electorate, both demographically and in terms […]

The Constitution Unit is leading a team running a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit, which will meet over two weekends, starting with the weekend of 8–10 September. The Assembly will consist of around 45 UK citizens, selected to reflect the diversity of the UK electorate. Alan Renwick and Rebecca McKee explain how the Assembly will work […]

The Constitution Unit has today launched an Independent Commission on Referendums, to review the role of referendums in UK democracy and consider how the rules and practice could be improved. The Commission’s members represent a range of political opinions, with expertise extending across all major UK referendums of recent years. Alan Renwick and Meg Russell […]

Last month’s general election delivered the latest in a series of political surprises, with the Conservatives falling short of a majority when many had anticipated they would win a landslide. On 21 June the Constitution Unit hosted a panel of election experts consisting of YouGov’s Joe Twyman and academics Justin Fisher, Jennifer Hudson, Philip Cowley […]

Today is the first anniversary of the EU referendum. To mark this the UK in a Changing Europe Initiative and Political Studies Association have published a collection of essays titled EU Referendum: One Year On. Alan Renwick‘s contribution, focusing on the continuing weakness of public debate around Brexit and how it might be strengthened, is re-produced […]